Everybody who writes wants to hear how incredibly great their work is. Great? The question to my head is how the readers really think of my third book.
At one point I decided to hear what they thought. You can get professional input but I feel that's not as important as getting the comments from non-writers and non-editors who actually read for great reasons. That's the best input a writer can find.
I'd like to hear from you, no matter who you are, reading the book and telling me your input. There are two people out there I'd love to have read it all and tell me what they think. I've been in the writing business for more than 30 years. I've been rejected at least a million. That does not mean my writing is awful, after all I won many awards and was nominated for a Pulitzer. It means a bunch of pros didn't want it.
Readers usually did.
The book after the first chapter is much funnier, but the first chapter tells you a lot.
Here's the first chapter...
The Lost Generation
a novel
By E. D. Easley
To Patti
Who gave me reason to do this
Copyright 2000
By E. D. Easley
Introduction
It wasn't that they were special, evil or anything. They just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time and too many of them assembled together.
Like their parents, they started out great. They spit up, they drooled ¬- and there were diapers to change. Real Cloth Ones. They learned to walk, talk and read. There was some blood, puke and other nasty body fluids involved. Generally it was red or brown and most everybody lived to tell the story - at least at first.
Later, those who could manage tools began to craft and fix things. Those who could manage words wrote, sang and spoke for whatever audiences dumb or intelligent enough to listen. Those who could fly flew, though a lot of those guys crashed and burned in a place called Vietnam, as well as in just about every corner of Earth. All for fairly silly reasons.
They were destined to become the inheritors of the world for a while. The Gods, The Kings, the people who kept the whole damn Machine Of Life running.
They were the ones the Baby Boomers had trained - and now trusted - to look after a planet. The ones who had been nurtured and encouraged to do The Right Thing with an entire society.
And the Baby Boomers had such high hopes for them. In fact, they created an entire financial structure that would guarantee their kids would be supported in the Eighties.
They were the children born in the 1950's and 1960's.
And a mistake had been made.
Maybe it was marijuana, alcohol, prozac or some other horrible drug that convinced the Baby Boomers that these children could pull it off. Maybe somebody dumped pounds of LSD into the water table. Perhaps space aliens had bombarded the planet with some wicked radiation that dulled their reasoning processes. It could have been The Ed Sullivan Show that did some terrible genetic damage.
But the bottom line is, for the most part, they were the generation that had no clue where to go, or how to get anywhere. Or why the hell they wanted to go anywhere at all.
They were The Lost Generation.
And somebody stupidly left them at the wheel just long enough to do some real damage.
In their defense, you can't really blame them for all the damage that was done. No, that would be like slapping around a moron who was heavily medicated on Thorazine. The moron walks into walls, and you wonder why.
It's not the moron's fault - he's one fry short of a Happy Meal.
No, in their case, all that anyone can do is get out the bandages and try to keep an eye out for the glass and furniture.
Indeed, the only sadder thing to have happened to the planet was that their children - Generation X - are doomed to inherit it. These are children raised by morons walking into walls. Generation X didn't even have the walls to walk into.
That's a concept devastating enough to send anybody off to the Tylenol bottle and wash a handful of the pills down with a quart of Scotch.
In their defense, look at where the Lost Generation came from; they were products of a social upheaval that Man (as a species - not a gender) hadn't seen since Ug or Ooola lit the first fire.
They watched their parents largely eliminate racial separation, war and sexism, invent rock and roll music, create the atomic bomb and land on the moon. The Baby Boomers counted Elvis, the Beatles, Timmy Leary and Carl Sagan among their number.
The Baby Boomers brought us close-up pictures of Saturn and Jupiter. And they created the computer.
They were a tough act to follow. And the Lost Generation didn't even try.
No, the clueless Lost Generation stopped flying into space, other than little taxi hops to space stations that were always falling apart and tumbling back to Earth. They tore down nuclear reactors and dumped the radioactive waste into the water table. They created crack cocaine, marijuana as strong as hashish, perfected the billion-unit condo complex and learned to surf the Net in ways it was never intended.
They gave us the angry sounds of punk music. They gave us Rap - and the jury's still out whether that is music.
They gave us AIDS and a string of hepatitis viruses that killed people who really didn't deserve to die. But die people did. Lots of people. Largely due to stupidity.
Oh, and the whole Eighties thing.
We can blame that on them easily.
This book was written somewhere around the end of the millennium by a member of the Lost Generation. If anyone has a right to laugh at them, I do. Indeed, I used to be one of the morons walking into walls - and the saddest part was that I was The Boss in some circles.
A lot of us simply checked out of that hotel. We left our keys on the table, packed our bags and headed down the road, leaving the mess to be cleaned up by the night crew.
After all, what logical choice do you have when you've ripped out the walls, broken all the windows, shot the television with a large caliber weapon and kicked the cat several times.
By the way, cats bite and scratch when you don't kick them hard enough. And well, there's a whole different set of matters to be considered with large caliber weapons....
Generation X could be angry with us, and probably should be. Thank whatever god you pray to that a few of the Lost Generation have carpentry skills.
There is still a lot of hope for the Lost Generation. After all, once they stop walking into walls and actually get down to the business of ruling the world, there are a whole lot of opportunities to make this rock, heck, this whole solar system a better place to live.
So go ahead and hope that they'll do it.
But don't hold your breath and don't quit your day job.
I'll show you why...
Chapter One
Michael Hamilton's life changed at 10:42 a.m. on a Tuesday.
It changed on the 50th floor in a Manhattan law office. He'd been to the doctor, and there was bad news.
You always know a doctor is going to give you very bad news when he wants you to personally sit down and talk about the results of your routine physical. The first sign is when the doctor calls you. Doctors don't call people these days; they have their flunkies do that.
When it's good news, some empty-headed, yet perky, receptionist calls and says "Hi, I'm Bambi - from Dr. Smith's office. All your tests are in and everything is just dandy. Have a nice day!"
Not that Bambi understands the importance of those words in the larger scheme of life. She may have the presence of mind to actually read a prepared script from the correct yellow sticky note, but don't count on her to know the difference between a biopsy and a pregnancy test.
Well, the pregnancy test she might understand...
No, when the guy with all the degrees on the wall calls, you can pretty well figure the Angel of Death has dumped dirty droppings all over AT&T's old phone lines and is doing a tap dance with your particular nervous system. It's a point where you can look forward to having tubes stuck up your throat and nose. You might as well consign yourself to wearing a complex system of designer IV tubes. All expensive, all fashionable. All painful.
And when the guy with the degrees hits you on your private line, just kiss it off and lay down, because you ain't going to be walking around a whole lot longer.
That's the point where you stop living day to day. It's where you learn to take your pulse every few minutes.
And so it was.
Some people take The News differently. Some will throw things around, break things or hurt other people badly with bombs and guns. Some flatly refuse to believe it. They buy bootlegged Barney the Purple Television Dinosaur hand puppets and act out old Johnny Quest adventures. Others withdraw completely and just go away quietly to shop the local funeral parlors and cemeteries - checkbook in hand.
Michael didn't do any of that. He ran his hands over the lapels of his $1700 custom suit, poured a tall glass of chilled Canadian whiskey and sat himself down in his outrageously expensive leather chair behind his outrageously expensive desk in his outrageously expensive corner office with a view of an outrageously expensive New York.
The walls were lined with framed front pages of The New York Times. Headline after headline screamed about humiliating defeats environmentalists had suffered in the court system. Nasty defeats, often the products of legal work that walked the delicate edge of the judiciary and terrorism.
Some people hang their awards on walls like those, others put college degrees or family pictures in those places. Those things had no meaning to Michael. He was the worst kind of dirty streetfighter on mean streets without warm fuzzy places.
Gold-paved streets, mind you, but streets washed in waves of blood.
Michael's victories, conquests on the grand scale. These had true meaning to him. His mark on the world and the work of his life was that he had become a winner's winner, and had stepped over plenty of bodies to get there.
There was a dart board. Affixed to it was a signed color glossy of Barney the Purple Television Dinosaur. A lone, angry dart sat squarely between the horrible creature's eyes. "I love you, Michael," the dinosaur had scrawled with a huge, obscene foam paw.
Somebody had killed Barney a couple of years ago. Barney just vanished from the face of the planet like Jimmy Hoffa, and no one knew why. There was a market for Barney stuff, as though whoever did that community service was apparently trying to clean up the evidence that The Purple One had ever existed.
Nobody loved Michael. They feared him the way one would fear Ted Bundy if the serial killer were given a license to kill. They respected his ability to produce results. They envied his wealth and the way he used it like a snow shovel, need be.
But love? Not even the mindless geek who donned a purple suit at minimum wage loved Michael. He lied, and the price of his threshold to cross the truth was very low.
But that was okay, in its own twisted way. Michael neither sought out or desired that emotion. It had become as alien as a moon rock to him.
And so were the concepts of fear and vulnerability - until today.
Michael drank that glass of whiskey. Fairly quickly. He took a deep breath. Then he called his secretary on the desk phone and told her to leave him alone.
In short, he just quit.
"It's not good news, Michael," the doctor had said. "I think you'd better come down."
"Look," said Michael impatiently, "I'm booked all day. I haven't got time for this. Let's do it over the phone."
There was a pause. "This is really not good news," the doctor replied. "I'd rather you be here or be around somebody who is really important to you."
In his mind, Michael could see the doctor's balding, puffy, middle-aged face. Sympathy from this toad? He wondered after that for a split second, dismissing the idea immediately as a tactic the doctor would use to take the sting out of his inflated bill.
"Kiss that off," said Michael curtly. "I'm a fucking lawyer. Nobody but the firm is close to me. Just tell me the news and get on with it."
"I know you're not married, and you have no kids - but there's got to be someone you can be with now." There was still almost something like actual sympathy in the doctor's voice. The tactic wasn't washing in Peoria. It was the stuff Oscars are won for, Mike mused.
"Ok, Doc," Michael said, "Let's just get down to the bottom line. Quickly. I've got a lunch date with the Greenpeace people and two lines on hold. Tell me what you have to say and let me get on with things."
There was another pause, and Michael fidgeted in aggravated anticipation.
"You're very sick," the doctor said flatly.
"Hell, I knew that," Michael said, raising his voice. "Christ, I've been getting the flu damn near every week. Why the hell did you think I came in and volunteered to pay the outrageous bucks you charge for a look-see. Do you really think I was having a good time while you poked around in places where the sun won't shine? Doc, I know something's wrong, so let's get on with it."
"It's not the flu, Michael," the doctor said. "It's hepatitis C."
"C, D, E or F, who cares," Michael replied, becoming increasing irritated. "Just give me a shot and fix it."
He could hear the doctor sigh, during another painful pause. "It's not that easy, Michael," he explained. "First of all there is no cure for it. Second, you've probably been walking around with it for more than 20 years."
A pattern was developing in their conversation. One that called for yet another pause.
"Here's where we're at," the doctor continued, now dropping into that clinical and professional mode medics use to distance themselves from the daily biological horrors they encounter. "I've got to do a biopsy to get a look at how bad your liver has been damaged by this. The normal progression is to put you on interferon for six months, and if you think you're sick now, this is going to get worse."
"You mean you're going to make me sick to make me better?" Michael wondered. "It's not like AIDS or cancer or anything? You know, the stuff that makes your hair fall out..."
"Yeah," the doctor replied. "Like AIDS or cancer. People die from what you have. About 10,000 every year. If the drugs don't work, we'll have to get you a new liver. The problem is that there are something like six billion people ahead of you waiting in line."
A little light immediately came on in Michael's mind. "These are the nineties," he said, "I mean parts are parts, right?"
"No," the doctor said. "There are a lot of factors like blood types and tissue compatibility. If we have to get to that point, your body may reject the organ and we could lose you. There just aren't enough people donating organs to supply the demand quickly. And, my friend, unfortunately you cannot live without a liver."
"So maybe some of them will die while I'm waiting - lots of them," Michael said, wondering if he still had the personal number of the mob boss he'd bailed out of a toxic waste charge. "Or maybe I could buy one through, shall we say, alternative means?"
"I don't think so," the doctor responded with the tone of a man shaking his head in disgust. "Your odds are better getting a cab on Wall Street after the market closes."
Michael took a deep breath. "So what do you figure my chances are?"
"I won't know until the biopsy," replied the doctor. "But looking at the results, we could be somewhat optimistic. Some people go into remission spontaneously. Others respond to the chemical therapy very well. And we're doing pretty well with the liver transplants - but we've only had that technology for a few years. To explain, we didn't even know about this disease until the late eighties."
"Stop dancing around it," Michael insisted. "Give me some ballpark numbers."
There were paper shuffling noises on the line. "I really won't know until we can get a specialist to look at you and analyze the data. The only thing I can tell you for certain is that you are very sick, but that there is hope."
"Percentages, Doc."
Again, yet another pause passed. "Again, I don't know," the doctor said tentatively. "But based on the results, I'd give you a 25 percent chance of making your mid-forties if we get treatment now. Without treatment, I'd like an invitation to every birthday party you have from here on out."
"You mean I'm going to die from the flu?"
"Hepatitis C," the doctor corrected. "You probably got it when you used to share needles in the Seventies."
"Whoa," Michael said. He was at once reminded that he'd been completely honest with his doctor. That honesty included the fact that he had experimented with shooting heroin as a teenager. Everybody had been doing it back then, it seemed - and he wondered why they all weren't falling dead on the streets from this bug.
Or maybe they were....
"And from here out, I have to warn you about a couple of things," the doctor said calmly. "The first thing is that you have to remember your blood transmits the disease. Don't give blood and be very careful about where you bleed. It's possible - but not likely - to transmit it sexually, so you should always use precautions. And I have to register you with the health department as a carrier."
"Say what?" Michael countered quickly. An immediate flag went up regarding his right to privacy with his doctor. It was a legal, as well as ethical, understanding in his mind that the doctor shouldn't be spreading his name all over the place as though he were a walking toxic waste dump.
He filed the objection away in his mind as a future suit. Lawyers do this stuff all the time out of reflex.
"Don't release my name to anybody," Mike warned. "You'll be very sorry."
"You've gotten the short course, Michael," the doctor said firmly, ignoring the implied threat. "The way you asked for it. Let me spell it out: Don't bleed, use condoms and get used to the idea that the government is aware that you have something serious that you can give to other people.
"Stay away from the booze, eat right, and for God's sake get in here for help.
"This is your life. I can't change the facts, but there's always a chance you could go into spontaneous remission or that technology will catch up with something that will kill your virus. I'm not making any promises, but they're coming up with some absolutely incredible things all the time in the experimental plateau. Thank your stars you don't have to hunt for new health insurance now."
"I'm not going to be somebody's lab rat," Michael said flatly. No, that would be surrendering control of himself - something he simply didn't do.
"That's your decision," the doctor noted. "But I do know some people doing research on your condition at Yale-New Haven Hospital. They could help."
"No way," Michael countered, thinking they could poke and prod Barney The Purple Television Dinosaur, but they weren't playing Frankenstein and shooting poison or rat piss into him. "No flat fucking way."
If Michael could see the doctor's face at that moment, he would have known the doctor understood and was nodding his head in agreement.
"Well Mike," the doctor said. "I can see you tomorrow at ten."
Even Michael knew that when a doctor gives you an immediate appointment - and actually expects to keep it - things were indeed indeed.
"I have a lot to think about right now," Mike said, and his head was swimming. "Pencil me in, and I'll call to confirm."
"And Doc, thanks, I guess."
"Listen Mike -" the doctor said, "I strongly suggest you don't miss this appointment."
The line went dead and the doctor looked at the receiver, suspecting he would never see Mike again.
As mentioned earlier, Mike did not say goodbye. He just punched the off button on the phone and went after the business of getting after his fine, cold whiskey and ingesting large quantities of it in a way that it was not intended.
The phone buzzed many times, but he didn't answer. For the rest of Mike's life he would remember that time as a total void. And it was. He didn't think with the higher functions of his brain.
He didn't rationalize or panic, to Mike those were alien reactions. His head just largely shut down, except for one thing - and that was an instinct.
Mike wanted to get away from here - from everything around him. Maybe the answer was out there somewhere, just maybe. But he knew in what was left of his heart that the answer sure as hell was not here.
They have been called Biblical Diseases by some folks; God's hand striking down the sinners.
AIDS, hepatitis C and a couple of herpes viruses look like that to some people. They are largely - at least at first - spread among the sexually promiscuous, the drug addicts, and the homosexuals.
Sinners get them from other sinners, and a segment of the population jumps around in glee. The evildoers were wiping themselves out by sharing dirty needles or having sex out of wedlock.
Hey, they thought, what goes around comes around. Nobody was dropping dead in droves from eating communion wafers or drinking good cold beer.
But the bugs weren't Biblical. Some people believe they are products of government testing with diseases. A lot of these people are also convinced there is a conspiracy of powerful people who created the diseases to wipe out the "sinners" and "undesirables" in Western Cultures.
Some people think aliens brought them - that alien abductees were intentionally or unintentionally infected after being poked and prodded by folks from Out There. Folks who would be found in the desert with strange puncture marks on their bodies and gaping holes in their memories.
Folks found near Area 54.
The best guess with most folks is that they are byproducts of natural selection. Mankind has been getting increasingly good at the business of surviving. Nature, on the other hand, keeps creating new ways to kill people. These new, deadly diseases were simply a New Plague.
It's that tug of war between natural selection and mutation.
Any way about it, the diseases didn't stick just to sinners. No, the sinners gave blood long before anyone knew about these diseases. Transfusions and sloppy blood handling in the Eighties and Nineties did a lot of the work. Careless day-to-day stuff like pinpricks and messy interpersonal contact did more yet.
That blood went into perfectly God-fearing folks - who also, by the way, spread the diseases before they knew they were infected.
Now some estimates put the number of people wandering the streets with these diseases at tens of millions globally.
And Mike was just one The Bug decided to pick on.
Mike's resignation was simple. His secretary was a great-looking brunette in her twenties. He was opening his second bottle of Canadian when he buzzed her over the intercom.
"Yes, Mr. Hamilton?" she asked flatly. In reality, she was a wee bit concerned. He'd ignored all incoming calls, and left those on hold hanging. It wasn't like him to slip away from the game.
In his office, looking at the cell phone he'd smashed with his heel on the floor, he thought after her for a moment. Tanya was one of those world-class secretaries who had the looks, incredible efficiency, and presence of mind to anticipate your every need. One of those that you had to keep at arm's distance because you knew you'd fall into a hopeless bottomless pit with her personally, intellectually and sexually. Become a slobbering fool who'd do something stupid like marry her.
She'd have been a great geisha a couple of hundred years ago in a place several thousand miles away. These days they'd simply clone her and negotiate stock options.
"Standard resignation, effective immediately," he returned, knowing she had one on her computer. "Deliver it today, and get down to Personnel for a new assignment."
"A-a-are you sure about this?" she stuttered
"Ah-yeah," Michael responded. "It's been great, but I have some things to do."
He was out the door, passing her before she could even call up the word processing program. He just wanted to get out quickly.
Outside, he marveled at the opulent suites of offices as though it was the first time he'd seen them. There were brain cells that kicked in that reminded him how he'd been struck starry-eyed as a young environmental law specialist.
He came here as a new graduate from Harvard Law School. No, he hadn't been at the top of his class - Lord, he had to cheat like hell on the finals to even graduate. But that degree, from that school, provided him with the promise of a meal ticket for life and was well worth the price of every term paper he'd purchased.
And a fine meal it had been.
Actually, the truth be told, anti-environmentalists would best describe what he did. He had been paid a whole lot of money to defend the big polluters of the world from a system that really didn't care about the environment.
A lot of years, a lot of cases - and a whole lot of whales and dolphins had come and gone in the time he'd been here. He'd been a kind of spin doctor and bail bondsman for folks who threw oil in the ocean, nuclear waste in the air and toxic waste into indiscriminate unmarked land dumps.
He'd seen the bozos on the other side of the courtroom. Often working for peanuts or some twisted sense of idealism. He'd convinced himself at the onset there was no money in idealism or ethics. Show him the money and he'd find a mink-lined crack to slip through that would dust a do-gooder in a heartbeat.
But that was then. This is now.
And this is a place he did not want to be anymore.
The place was a haunted house where most of the scary critters knew him by first name and had his footprints on their backs.
His departure was a kind of avoidance - and not a very good one. In the back of Mike's head he knew The Disease was coming for him. In the front he had created, he didn't want to think about it or anything else.
For Michael, it was to be a day of a numbing kind of self-discovery while aimlessly walking the streets of New York. His mortality began to sink in. It may sound strange that anyone could hit the wall of their conscience in that cesspool.
But Michael did.
It was a spiritual thing he experienced, so deep an experience he was unaware he had his pocket picked and was otherwise robbed on three separate occasions. One smelly homeless fellow even tried to wash his windshield in a crosswalk - in spite of the fact that Michael wasn't driving.
But there, the little light went on in his head again. There, he began to map out the course he would take for what remained of his life.
He evolved into a different flavor of creature, thanks to the pressure cooker of crisis.
He knew that if there was a hell, it was very likely he'd just stepped on the express train to it. He was no longer bulletproof, and he didn't like the sense of vulnerability that came along with slipping off the flack jacket.
In short, he was in unfamiliar territory with no compass or stars to guide him.
He walked Wall Street first. He bought a hot dog on a corner, squirted some brown mustard on it and looked up at the tall buildings and looked down to all the people with briefcases hurrying around to their next appointments.
He thought about how temporary it all was. The buildings would eventually be worn to dust by the weather, all the deals these folks were so intent on making right now would eventually turn into other deals, and, well, they'd all die. All the money that changed hands, and all the effort to keep the structures up would be to little avail.
And the sorry part about the people - for a lot of them - no one would miss their absence for very long.
And he was one of them.
He had no wife, no lover, no family to mourn him. His folks had died some years ago and there were no brothers and sisters. There was just the sizable bank account he'd built over the years from blood money. And Herb.
Herb was his dog. A Big Dog. A mutt, actually, with a whole lot of English sheepdog in him and only God knows what else. Smart fellow. Tolerant of Michael's workaholic nature, but demanding in his own way.
As he took the last bite from his hot dog, he thought how much Herb would like one of these.
After all, today it appeared the dog was his only friend.
For the record, that's just about the time his pocket was picked.
He looked at the Empire State Building for a long time from the front door. Just looked up.
And up.
It used to be the tallest building in the world, but now trade centers in town and in Chicago had long since dwarfed it. Hell, there were shopping malls on the planet with more floor space than this structure.
The Empire State Building was a dinosaur who simply forgot how to fall down, die and forget its glory days with not so much as a tar pit for comfort.
But none of those bigger buildings had the class, craftsmanship and majesty of the old girl. No, these are things that were built in. She was a product of pride and was one of a kind.
Michael knew there was a lesson to be learned here.
It escaped him at the moment, but he was certain it would come to him soon.
And it really would.
The dragon was beautiful.
He was a dozen different colors and spanned the length of the building's outer wall a story tall. As much as a two-dimensional object could, he danced and sang.
Tony Chan put down the spray paint can, quietly moved the ladder and stepped back to admire his work. He was pleased with what he saw.
No one did street art like he did. Granted, he'd had to cover up the gang taggings on the brick - and he knew he'd probably have to pay hell for that.
In the meantime, he had the deep satisfaction of knowing he'd created something very special that would stand for a little while.
That was when the man came.
He was a backlit shadow in the dark. Absolutely silent. Had Tony not been watching the alley in that streetwise fashion that becomes instinct in New York City Proper, he'd never have known the man was there.
And likewise, the self-defense aspects of those instincts kicked in. His hand went to his pocket in a flash and had the butterfly knife at steel faster than most eyes could follow. Tony wondered what had stumbled in, but he knew he was not going to allow it to take him out without a fight.
He couldn't really see the man smile as he reached into his jacket and removed a large semiautomatic pistol, an accessory Stretch Walker never left the building without when he was in New York. To not do so would be such an act of stupidity - God knows, almost a breech of manners - as much as visiting a fine restaurant without a credit card.
In this neighborhood, heavy firearms were as commonplace as keychains. Indeed, some of them were used as keychains - at least when the locks were changed, a fellow could still get inside a building by blowing the door apart.
Even in the now-dim light, Tony recognized the disparity of this backstreet arms race. He also realized that the yards between them put him at an even greater disadvantage. He could move around and try to dodge bullets. He could take a shot at trying to throw his knife at the man.
Sizing up the situation, he realized he was a hair-trigger, split second away from meeting his Maker.
But he wasn't going to admit that at the moment. Poker was a street game people played with life in his neighborhood. There were just some hands you couldn't throw in easily.
"We gonna get down here, or what," he said as steadily as possible, in the bravest voice he could muster.
The man took a couple of steps forward. A tactical mistake, Tony thought. His throwing arm wasn't that good, but he knew he could hit the guy with some degree of accuracy now. The knife went to his shoulder, ready for flight.
"Put the knife back in your pocket," Stretch said quietly, mist settling in the street behind him. "I'm not going to hurt you, and I'm sure as hell not going to let you hurt me."
Tony cocked his head and considered this. He was far better with a spray can than he was with a knife. As he folded the blade and slid it back in his pocket, he silently said the short version of The Lord's Prayer to himself.
"So what's your problem, man?" he asked.
Stretch slowly and deliberately placed his gun back in its holster and stepped into the best light there was, now less than a few yards from the young man.
He was late thirties, maybe forty, with collar-length hair, a closely cropped beard and above-average street clothes. And apparently, clip-fed, hollow-point underwear.
Little did Tony suspect that Stretch was now the richest man in the world. What he didn't own was in the process of being acquired by a very large staff of people whose sole mission was to buy the rest of the planet for him.
But that's another story.
"You'd be painting my building," Stretch said, now smiling.
Tony gestured at the wall. "It had to be done," he said. "The dragon was there, but somebody had to bring him out where everybody could see him."
"Couldn't it have been somewhere else?" Stretch asked.
Tony shook his head. "No way. He lives here."
Stretch nodded and admired the work at length. This was not graffiti. This was street art in its finest form - the kind where an artist's talent was screaming to get out - to be displayed - but the poor sod couldn't afford a canvas. Forget the fact that a gallery would probably turn its upscale nose up at him.
And the boy had the gift, if not the manners, to become one of those few artists who actually made a living off his work.
He just needed a break.
"So what's your problem, man," Tony asked, breaking Stretch's thought train. "Am I out of here without you ventilating me or what?"
"No," Stretch said flatly, reaching into his jacket pocket.
Tony immediately began to go for his knife, but Stretch waved him off. The older man withdrew a business card and closed the distance between them. At arm's length he handed the card to Tony.
"My problem is that you're not finished," Stretch said quietly. "I want you to do the whole damn building."
It took a couple of minutes for this to sink in with Tony. First, he had to get over the fact that this man was not going to shoot him. That aside, he looked over the five-story structure and then shook his head.
"That's a whole lot of real estate," he said. "I don't have the time."
Stretch nodded. "Would you find it at twenty bucks an hour, plus equipment and expenses?"
"Say what?"
"I like your style," Stretch waved at the dragon. "I want the whole building done in your work."
Tony looked at the building and then at the business card. He looked at both a second time. "You'd be Roger then?"
"No," Stretch said shaking his head. "That's the guy I want you see tomorrow. He manages my New York accounts. I'll give him a call in a wee bit and let him know you're coming. And punch in for the work you did on the dragon. Consider it a paid audition."
At that, Stretch turned and began to walk away. Tony stopped him short with a hand on his shoulder. "So who should I tell him sent me."
Stretch turned and smiled again. "He knows who I am," he shrugged. "And he'll understand."
At that, Stretch left the alley, leaving the young man to stare at the wall and dream about what it would become. He made a mental note to come back and see it the next time he was in town.
He also wondered which university he was going to sponsor the kid through. Calvin would know.
Stretch bumped into Michael, quite literally, while leaving the alley. The force of their collision drove them away from each other.
At this point, the now-watchless and walletless pickpocket-prone Michael had loosened his tie and looked a bit disheveled, down to his missing cuff links. And a bit spaced as well.
Stretch, hand on his gun's butt, looked the man up and down and recognized him almost immediately.
"Michael?" he asked, removing his hand from the gun and stretching it out to the man, "Michael Hamilton?"
Michael, of course, had never seen the man in his life.
He knew he'd had quite a day and his mind had been pretty badly scrambled. The man before him could easily be a former client or somebody he'd met in one of those many endless, mindless cocktail parties upscale attorneys are drafted into attending.
The man was offering his hand to him, and heck, at least he knew he wouldn't lose his watch in the deal. That, like his life, had been pretty much stolen from him this day.
So he took the hand and shook it. "Yes," he said out of reflex. "How are you?"
Faking to remember people is a skill upscale environmental lawyers learn early and cultivate carefully over time. The key point is to appear that your last encounter was pleasant and to allow the other person to reveal any information that would give a clue to whatever relationship or encounter they may have had.
"Stretch Walker," Stretch said, releasing the hand. "I'm sorry, but we really haven't met yet."
This left Michael speechless. His mind raced trying to figure out how this total stranger could have recognized him, by name, and on sight. It was unlikely that it had been from the television or newspapers, since his media appearances had always been fairly brief.
"I don't expect you to understand," Stretch said raising his hands. "The fact is that God told me you were coming, and I'm ready for you. Come on up here and we'll get a drink."
Speechless, Michael followed the other man into the building. After all, it seemed to be the right thing to do at the time.
And it was, from a certain point of view.
The building seemed to be harmless enough; it was just series after series of office cubicles, one not much different from the other. They all had utility desks and computers, a couple of spare chairs and some people had brought in pictures of their families and other things to attempt to personalize their workspaces.
At this hour of the night they encountered no one. Not even a security guard, which Michael thought unusual.
Stretch led him to one of the cubicles. It was spare and stripped of anything that would give any clue to who the occupant was. Stretch flopped into the seat by the computer and waved at one of the two chairs in the corner. While Michael went through the process of sitting, Stretch opened a drawer and extracted a bottle of liquor and a pair of glasses.
"Canadian, right?" Stretch said, it not really being a question, pouring.
Michael nodded back and accepted the glass of whiskey offered. Both men took a drink.
"We really don't do anything here," Stretch offered with a shrug, "Other than look after all the other stuff that we have going on. And it's sad to say it takes this much space to do that."
Michael took another drink, then summoned up his voice. "How do you know me?"
"I already told you," Stretch countered, "God told me you'd be by. Actually I pretty much got the short course on your story."
"I'm confused," Michael said, stating the understated
"Look," the man with facial hair said, "I'm an atheist myself, so I don't expect you to buy into the whole God thing. The fact is that I've been asked to give you a hand as you need it. God's a close, personal friend of mine, but that doesn't shake my faith."
It took a moment while Michael tried to let that sink in. An atheist who hung out with a deity - and believed in that deity - simply didn't wash. So he chose silence and another sip of what was obviously quality Canadian.
"Let's see," Stretch continued, "it's hepatitis C, the doctor just told you today and you've decided not to seek treatment ... correct me if I'm wrong."
Michael was stunned. "That's pretty much how it is."
"It's going to kill you, you know," Stretch said. "You haven't got much time unless you get in and let them help you. You're full-blown."
"You don't know that," Michael countered.
"Yeah, actually I do," Stretch said. "Actually I can get a date for you if you want. Personally, were it me, I wouldn't want to know."
"So how do you know all this?"
Stretch sat back in his chair, lighting a cigarette. He offered one to Michael, who took and lit it with the gold lighter the little girl on the street who stole his watch had not had the presence of mind to lift.
"I told you, I got it from God," Stretch said. "I'd like to say I knew what you went through today, but I don't. I can just try and sympathize and encourage you to get the help you need. Really, if you think you're sick now, wait. It's going to get a whole lot worse. And I can think of a whole lot of more pleasant ways to die."
Michael shrugged. It was all too much. He'd accepted the fact that he was either hallucinating or in the presence of the clinically insane. Experience had taught him not to make any sudden moves and to speak in low, gentle tones. Lord knows how many CEOs he'd dealt with like this.
"Okay," he said. "You pretty much have it right, so what?"
Stretch smiled and leaned back in his chair, taking a draw from his glass. "So nothing. You and the dog are about to go on a little trip and I'm to give you what aid I can."
The reference to Herbi did shake Michael. After all, who else would know he had this huge, friendly monster who was of questionable parentage - and happened to be Jewish.
"Oh, yeah," said Stretch, as though reading his mind, "I know the dog's a Jew. But I'm cool with that."
Mercy McDonald squinted at the computer screen. Her eyes had that sandy, beat-up quality folks get when they spend entirely too much time on the Web. It was now two in the morning, but she didn't care. For this particular project, she did her best work at night.
She hit the ENTER key with a long, delicate finger. Then she deliberately stood up. As bad, as fast, and as well-programmed as this computer system was, her program was at a stage of development that the routines and procedures she'd just finishing writing would take hours.
Mercy rubbed her chin while staring at the temporarily frozen screen. She'd always enjoyed working with a blue background, but one of the things she'd accomplished was to be something of a personal joke. Every screen in the world would be turning red at midnight on July 4th.
Every screen in the world, that is, hooked up to the internet.
God forgive those poor suckers working on green or monochrome screens. Their monitors would just go black. They'd miss her little joke, but still see the greater part of the show.
Yes indeed, in a very short period of time, the whole world would have her attention, if only but for a few moments. After that, well, there would be other things for them to think after and tend to.
She padded off in her plaid socks through the studio apartment to the wall that served as her kitchen. There, she poured a cup of black coffee, and took a sip. Overheated. Overcooked. Bitter. Just the way she liked it - it was, after all, a taste acquired from 15 years of spending entirely too much time in cyberspace.
She pulled the sweater sleeves up her pale, thin arms and brushed a lock of red hair from her skinny, yet sullenly pretty, Irish-freckled face. She heard a sound of thunder from the south of Denver. And she knew at that moment, indeed, she had become a mightier force on the evolutionary scale.
Understand that Mercy was a kind of god in her own right. No, she couldn't walk on water or actually throw lightning bolts out of the sky.
(Hold that thought for a moment. In reality, Mercy could and would have the lightning-chucking capacity before this story is all told. But that doesn't happen for a chapter or so.)
No, Mercy was a different kind of deity. One that slept in the small, badly rumpled bed in the remote corner of a fairly large studio apartment. Not that the place was spacious; all the walls and most of the floorspace was packed from floor to ceiling with the best computer gear the state of the art allowed.
And it was Doctor McDonald - to those who acknowledge the title granted to folks with multiple doctorates in things other than medicine. Mercy's specialty was in something a wee bit more abstract. The best universities in the world had helped her become the finest computer programmer and hacker on the planet.
Actually, on technicality, the finest human hacker in our solar system, subtracting wandering aliens and considering the joint-nation manned mission to Mars that was now in progress.
Mercy was in one of those self-absorbed moods where folks look at things, but are too caught up in their thoughts to really see what the hell they're looking at. They just stare blindly. No, this skinny, little, sensitive computer nerd was about to change the evolution and history of the entire planet.
Though the Mars mission had pissed her off, and given her a date to do the deed she planned, she didn't hold the whole thing against the astronauts.
For God's sake, the whole crew had this silly notion that by starting a Mars colony, mankind would have more elbow room and could stay the plan of the privileged that had prevailed for entirely too long. No, she had nothing against the poor slobs on the mission - the ones who'd actually smear their hands in red dust every bit as worthless and nasty as Oklahoma clay soil.
It was this whole business of forced evolution.
She'd be turning 40 the day that ship hit orbit around Mars. Independence Day in America. The Day The Rich Went Broke.
Globally.
The program had taken her five years to write, the past two years on very long days. Somewhere she had, just for giggles, calculated all the memory it was taking, but the number escaped her at the moment.
It was a whole lot. Only astronomers and other geeks used those kinds of numbers.
On Independence Day, the wealth of the whole planet would be redistributed. Well, all the cash anyway, and most of the physical assets that were consigned to public record.
Entire nations of rich, exploitive fuckers would awake to the news they'd been wiped out. Entirely. Their lands and businesses would be sold and reassigned to dummy corporations who in turn would distribute the ill-gotten gains to every poor soul in the world with an income less than $20,000 per year.
The eviction notices would begin to arrive on the 5th of July. It was all part of the routine. All so efficient and automatic.
In short, the two percent of the world that controlled 98 percent of the world's wealth were about to discover they were broke and homeless. And they couldn't even use their gold credit cards to buy a cup of coffee for breakfast.
The banks, of course, would be the first to fall. With all the world's wealth mysteriously gone, it would take about eight days for the certified checks to arrive to most folks from the one Swiss bank she'd chosen to handle things.
After all, it takes a few days for a bank to print a few billion checks - even though the process would be totally mechanized. In the meantime, the other banks would find themselves high, dry and unable to cover what cash withdrawals that would be demanded.
She took another sip of bad, black coffee and returned to her terminal, the cold blue eye of it staring back at her. Yeah, it was going to be a mess, she told herself. But damn, it would be interesting.
They say you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. Well, she intended to make a whole planet of omelets.
If anyone was to blame, that'd be Cable News Network. The whole concept of this heist - one that would dwarf anything ever known to her species - could, in a way, be blamed on the perpetually-running news channel.
CNN - actually it's on-line sister - gave her the scoop on the Mars launch. She'd been watching the blips as she waited for a program to finish running in the background of her computer. Weighing in at a couple of billion dollars, news about the mission was followed by a report on kids falling dead on the streets from starvation and disease in Africa.
Those kids died so that other fat, tan, rich plutocrats could sip fine wines, hire fine doctors - doctors who had also become plutocrats - and live in fine homes. Fine homes that would soon be on Mars.
Well, come Independence Day, Little Miss Mercy would change all that. The couple of billion bucks dropped on the space cadets could have saved a whole lot of starving people.
She'd been working on a professional project that had the potential to redistribute the world's wealth, freeze all computers, shut down global communications and render entire governments entirely penniless and defenseless.
Mercy had never intended to initiate it. It originated as an academic matter to demonstrate how vulnerable the world was in the Information Age - and how easy it would be to cast Man back into the Stone Age.
As it turned out, it would be remarkably easy. One routine running now - as it had for more than a year - had pretty much cracked every access code to every computer in the world and was constantly updating the information. On Independence Day, it would lay open virtually every computer hooked into a modem in a matter of moments.
Another would actually do the deed of the thieving, as another managed the distribution.
Incredibly, it would all be done from a handful of telephone lines. She'd thought about doing it from a single line, but even as quick as her hard-working little electronic charges were, they needed their own paths to the checkout lanes.
She knew there would be problems, and that's why shortly after the initial deed was done, well, there would be no internet, no telephone lines, no satellite feeds. There would be no radio, and God forbid, no MTV.
She thought about the whole MTV thing, and that alone comforted her to know she was doing The Right Thing For Mankind. She'd seen the Rap version of The Beverly Hillbillies theme there.
The screen came back to life and she flexed her fingers. At the moment, she planned to update her database on the tax records and bank accounts for pretty much four-fifths of the world. Those would be cross-referenced with all kinds of things, like what cars they had registered, activity on credit cards - and yes, she'd know exactly what most of the folks in the world bought in the past year.
She could call up whether they'd bought bread or bangles with their debit and credit cards.
Not that she'd be able to absorb all that data in a lifetime. No, she'd trained an entire wall of the apartment to collate, contrast and compare all that crap. She did it constantly, just to keep track of spending patterns. In fact, she'd done well enough to discover how millions of people spent a whole lot more than they actually earned.
Most of those people were about to become very unhappy campers.
She smiled and clicked off the sequence of keys that would start the process. Today, life was good. Tomorrow, well, that was another matter.
They had been circling the planet for nine of its revolutions. Greet was on a punishment mission of sorts. Pretty much everyone on board had done something really offensive in public, and this kind of banishment was a way of making amends for fording, krihing or bliking.
They were essentially a nasty group of misfits, perverts and malcontents sent to float around in space for a long, long while, staring at worthless real estate until everybody had forgotten what they did and they could sneak home through the back door.
Bad as that was, every member of the crew chose the mission over prison. Becoming Eight-Armed-Bubba's Prison Bitch In Space was a severe deterrent to crime galaxy-wide.
It's true, in space, nobody can hear you scream.
And this was just one more in a long series of pretty tedious charting missions. Nothing worth conquering here - until now.
The other planets were pretty much normal fare. Gaseous star farts that hadn't really formed into anything worth the trouble of dragging much effort into mining. The rocks in the system, other than this one, were downright boring.
This rock had water and a really confusing mix of toxic gas around it. They'd need heavy life support to go for a stroll on the little ball of mud. Lights came on the side that wasn't facing the star, indicating not only life, but some level of technology and civilization.
And maybe something worth conquering. Hey, slaves were a universal commodity more valuable than ore.
If they could be subjugated and beaten into submission...
"Language, apparently, sir," Gleep said, excited, lights flashing all over his console. "Transmissions - primitive ones - and garbled. It will take the translator some time to sort this mess out."
"Visuals?" Greet hooted. "Can we see what they look like?"
"It isn't pretty, sir," Greep said. "Maybe we ought to just forget we passed by here."
Both knew that was not possible. They had to note and check out any sign of intelligent life, no matter how insignificant. Everything they did on the ship was monitored by hidden cameras. This was as much to preserve any history that might occur as it was to make sure no fording, krihing or bliking occurred on board.
A horrible sound filled the cabin at ear-splitting levels. On the screen before them a multi-colored mass writhed and spun - unaffected by gravity. If it had a bone structure, there was no evidence in the visual.
"Turn the sound DOWN!" Greet commanded.
"I can't!" Greep replied, shutting off the sound entirely. "Apparently it's supposed to be communicated at that awful level, as though the intended recipients were deaf and messages are communicated through strong vibrations on the walls and floors."
"Use the Universal Translator," commanded Greet. "Let's see what they are saying."
"Hummmumma blat scoop dop, muthafucka!" The horrible noise returned suddenly, and then was switched off again.
"I've tried, sir," Greep said desperately. "The translator can decipher any language pattern in the universe, but apparently this one has absolutely no logical value as communication."
"Turn off the visual and keep seeking something we can relate to," Greet ordered. "There has to be some kind of intelligent life down there!"
Greep sighed and went back to his panel. Neither alien was aware they had indeed found a very popular communication vehicle on Earth.
It was rap music on MTV.
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